Crypto startups raised close to $5 billion from venture investors in the first quarter of 2026, a headline figure that actually represents a 16 percent decline year-on-year, continuing a broader pullback in early-stage crypto funding that’s been underway since the 2025 speculative peak. But that top-line decline obscures a much sharper shift happening underneath it: Series C and later-stage capital surged 1,020 percent year-over-year and 320 percent quarter-over-quarter in the same period, meaning the money that is flowing is concentrating hard into a small number of already-proven, late-stage infrastructure companies rather than spreading across a broad field of earlier-stage bets.
Three deals from the first half of the year illustrate exactly where that late-stage capital is going, and none of them are consumer trading apps. Rain, a New York-based company building stablecoin-linked card and wallet infrastructure for enterprises, closed a $250 million Series C in January led by Iconiq Capital at a $1.95 billion valuation, a 17-fold jump from its valuation the previous March. It was Rain’s third funding round in under a year, following a $58 million Series B and a $24.5 million Series A, bringing its total raised to more than $338 million. The business itself is genuinely boring in the best sense: as a Visa Principal Member, Rain issues cards that let enterprises spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is accepted, and the company says it now facilitates more than $3 billion in annualized transactions across 200-plus partners, including Western Union, a name that matters directly for anyone thinking about how stablecoin rails might eventually intersect with OFW remittance corridors.
Alpaca, a brokerage infrastructure company providing APIs for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and fixed income to financial institutions and fintechs, closed a $150 million Series D in mid-January led by Drive Capital at a $1.15 billion valuation, crossing into unicorn territory. The round pulled in an unusually broad investor base spanning Citadel Securities, BNP Paribas’ venture arm, MUFG Innovation Partners, Kraken, and Flat Capital, the investment vehicle controlled by Klarna chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski. Alpaca now supports brokerage infrastructure for more than 300 organizations across over 40 countries, and the company has explicitly framed part of its expansion plan around bridging traditional and on-chain financial systems rather than picking one or the other.
The most recent of the three, EDX Markets, raised $76 million in a Series C led by SBI Holdings on July 7. EDX operates an institution-only crypto trading platform built around a structural principle borrowed directly from traditional finance: separating trading from custody through a central clearinghouse, which reduces the counterparty risk that has burned institutional crypto traders repeatedly over the years whenever an exchange doubled as its own custodian. Founded in 2023 with backing from Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab, Paradigm, and Sequoia Capital, EDX has recently launched a crypto-as-a-service product called FlowConnect for financial firms wanting to offer crypto trading to their own customers, and applied for a US national trust bank charter through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in April. SBI Holdings’ investment follows its own $289 million acquisition of crypto exchange Bitbank the previous month, part of a broader pattern of the Japanese financial conglomerate aggressively expanding its crypto infrastructure footprint.
What connects all three deals is the same thesis showing up from three different angles: the most fundable thing in crypto right now isn’t a better trading interface, it’s regulatory-grade plumbing, custody and clearing separation, compliant card-issuing rails, cross-border brokerage APIs, that lets traditional financial institutions plug into crypto markets without having to become crypto-native companies themselves. That’s consistent with the M&A wave happening in parallel this year, where banks and payment processors have been buying exactly this kind of infrastructure outright rather than partnering with it, suggesting infrastructure providers that don’t get bought first are positioning themselves to be the picks-and-shovels layer for whichever institutions do eventually build their own crypto capability.
For Philippine fintech founders pitching international venture capital, the read-through is fairly direct. GCash, Maya, and PDAX have already proven Filipino companies can build genuinely large-scale, regulator-facing financial infrastructure, and Rain’s Western Union partnership specifically shows international investors are actively funding exactly the kind of stablecoin-to-remittance-corridor bridge that a Philippine-based team would have a natural home-market advantage building. The current funding environment rewards exactly this kind of unglamorous, compliance-first infrastructure over consumer trading apps, a genuinely favorable shift for founders whose instinct has always been to build the boring, defensible layer rather than chase retail trading volume.
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